Since the beginning of this year, the London School of Economics has been running a debate series called, Cities in the 2020s: How are cities responding to profound global change? The next event is about localizing transport and it's scheduled for May 20, 2021. If you'd like to attend, click here. It's free and open to all. The one thing I would add is that I am getting the strong sense right now -- as cities, other than Toronto, begin to reopen -- that people are starting to remember just how much more fruitful in-person interactions are compared to being on screen. There's no comparison. In fact, earlier today I had in-person work interaction that resulted in a positive outcome that I am certain would not have happened otherwise. And as an ENTJ (business school made me take these personality tests), I find that I derive a lot of my energy from being around other people. As long as these sorts of things remain true, I believe that we will stay tethered to our cities and reliant on things like mass transit.

One of the first things that I noticed when I visited Rio de Janeiro a few years ago was the clear fixation on safety and security. There are gates and cameras everywhere. And the guidance you tend to receive from the locals usually resolves around how to stay safe. Don't wander around at night. Be careful when you take out your phone. Be mindful of certain areas. You know, those sorts of things.

Of course, you never really know how dangerous a city is because it's one of those things that's impractical to test. You're not going to wander around dark places just to see what the probability of being robbed is. The more sensible thing to do is simply believe what people are telling you and you observe the cues scattered around the built environment.

The result is a general sense of anxiety. You're not quite sure if all the gates and cameras are truly necessary, but their mere presence makes you believe that they might be. I mean, why else would they be so pervasive? Or, could it be that people are overshooting with their investments in safety and security because, well, fear and paranoia are strong motivators?

I was reminded of all of this as I read through Ed Chartlon's recent book review of, Panic City: Crime and Fear Industries in Johannesburg. The title of his review is Anxious Urbanisms, and I think that's a good way of describing some of these phenomenons. It's an urbanism of uncertainty. I haven't read the book (yet), but it's an interesting topic.

So I will leave you all with this excerpt from the review:

Ultimately, what we might take from Panic City, then, is less a comprehensive sociology of crime in the city and more a method of affective analysis. What the book provides is a sense of the ways in which the emotional sphere organises space, how feelings like anxiety or fear or panic, currently widely distributed across the world, materialise themselves, architecturally and politically. If immunity is anything like security, Murray offers us a cautionary tale. For wherever uncertainty thrives, so does the tendency towards paranoid thinking—which is to say, a contagion of a different sort, one that licences regimes of suspicion, self-protection and individual security, and all at the eventual cost of collective wellbeing and interdependence. 

LSE Cities has just published a new report called, Living in a denser London: How residents see their homes. The goal of the research project was to better understand how modern housing projects are working (or not working) for Londoners. And so they connected with over 500 residents from 14 completed housing projects and got their feedback on everything from built form to community engagement. Most of the housing projects were completed in the last ten years, but they also surveyed projects from 1980, 1947, and 1902. If you don't feel like going through the full report, there is also this website and this short film.

Image: LSE Cities